David Seringo’s body was found at dawn, slumped against the cracked stone wall near Kigamboni’s forgotten docks, where only the ocean and stray dogs kept vigil. He had been many things: a husband, a dreamer and a man who loved the smell of rain on city streets. But in death, he was just another case file tossed onto Inspector Salum Ngoma’s battered desk. The humid air of Dar es Salaam folded over the morning, heavy with salt and rust and something else Ngoma knew all too well: the reek of rotting secrets.

The crime scene yielded little: a cracked wristwatch, sand-kicked shoes, and bruises that told of a long, savage death. No witnesses, no cameras. Simply silence, and in Dar es Salaam, silence might be guilt or fear. At midday the rumour was circulating in the city’s bloodstream. Papers were suggesting a botched robbery. Radio broadcasts hummed with rumour. Halls of the central police station whispered of something darker, something sinister.

Miriam Seringo sat in the interrogation room, dry eyes wide and unblinking. Her black headscarf was tied back tidily; her hands, resting motionless in her lap, offered only a shiver. Inspector Ngoma stood with his arms crossed against the wall, looking at her wearily.
“Recall it again,” he instructed, voice worn from years of cheap coffee and cheaper deceptions. “When did you ever see your husband alive?”
Miriam raised her chin, “Around ten last night. He went out after… after a row.”
“Row over what?”
“He thought I was going out with someone else,” she replied in a voice as fragile as rice paper.
“Did you?” Ngoma asked without batting an eye.
Miriam laughed hesitantly, “Does it matter now?”

Inspector Ngoma lit a cigarette he didn’t want and gazed out over the city’s slow, sweaty exhalation. The case was already beginning to stink like rainwater that had sat too long in the gutters. At his desk, the first faint strands of a lead were brought in through the door by Janeth, a friend of Miriam’s. She reeked too much of perfume, the heavy floral smell driving the smoke of the cigarette into the room’s periphery.
“She’s upset about it,” Janeth replied quickly, smoothing her skirt. “Miriam adored him.”
Ngoma snorted, “Sit down, then, and tell me all you know about Miriam’s recent activities.”
Janeth hesitated, her fingers wrapped around the purse strap. “She wasn’t doing anything bad,” she said hastily. “She just… needed a little excitement. David was a good man, but, you know, sometimes good men just aren’t enough.” Ngoma waited. At last, in a low tone, Janeth whispered, “She met somebody. Rich guy. Big name. Owns those upmarket bars around the ocean. You must know them.”
Ngoma’s heartbeat hammered once, sluggish and heavy. Masaki. Money. Secrets.
“Name?”
“I don’t know,” Janeth lied abysmally. She tried to leave, but her body shrieked with horror. Ngoma let her go. She had said enough.

At sunset, the Coral Lounge poured golden light onto the fissured pavements of Masaki. Luxury cars filled the road, and air vibrated with notes too deep to be sound. Ngoma stood in the background. The bar itself was mirrored and shadowed within, where too much money and too little conscience went to blur the fine line. The bartender glanced Ngoma’s way, decided he wasn’t worth conversation, and returned to polishing glasses. The opposite side of the room was dominated by a circle of men who controlled things, loud and confident in their sphere. Centre of the table: Leonard Bura: gold watch, pinstripe suit, smile that did not quite reach his eyes. Ngoma saw him drink down a liquor, slap a laughing man on the back, and stoop to whisper something into the ear of a woman too young to be anything but bright.
And he saw Miriam.

She walked back through the side door in one of those tacky but quiet-money simple black robes that flaunted wealth without shouting. She hadn’t noticed Ngoma, shoved into the corner against the wall, for that matter. She entered the room with the smooth, practiced motion of a woman who’d done the very same thing exactly a thousand times. Leonard Bura stepped forward to greet her, a hand patting too familiarly around her back. They were speaking in whispers. Miriam was laughing, not the rough, croaked, widow’s cackle, but the rich, throaty laughter for men like Leonard. Ngoma breathed slowly through his nose. He stubbed out his cigarette. Miriam was not grieving. She was celebrating.

Outside, the wet evening closed in on Ngoma as he made his way to the car park. He had glimpsed the sort of man Leonard Bura was. Guys such as Leonard had not gotten their hands dirty. They had used other people for that purpose, a swift push out to the ocean, an instant moment of a disappearing act, a robbery nicely but just neatly done. David Seringo had not gone quietly though. That was clear from how he was lying. Ngoma pulled out his phone and dialled his aide. “Get to work,” he told her. “Leonard Bura. See who he runs with. Who he’s in debt to. Who’d be stupid enough to get dirty for him.” He hung up before she had a chance to get her mouth open. The dead husband case wasn’t procedure anymore. It was all power, pride, and a woman who smiled too openly while her husband’s blood was still warm in the sun of Dar es Salaam. Ngoma glanced back at the Coral Lounge for the final time. The neon sign whirred in the blackness like a dying insect. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and melted away into the night.

Ngoma slept little. The city beyond his window never did. He heard the faraway buzz of boda bodas, the faraway boom of container vessels unloading in the harbour. Guys like Leonard Bura earned their cash out there somewhere while everyone else slept. Mid-morning, his secretary, Farida, appeared at his door and knocked.
“I found something,” she replied, voice bitten off by tension. “One of Bura’s bodyguards, Jackson Mwampashi. Petty thug, given a promotion when he began working security for Bura’s clubs.”
Ngoma wrote down the name, “What else?”
“Two years ago, Jackson was busted for assault outside a club in Kariakoo. Charges vanished after Bura paid bail.”
Ngoma grinned wickedly, “Good. Find where Jackson drinks off duty.”

That evening, Ngoma spotted him in a battered-up Corolla outside Sanaa Lounge, a smaller, less fancy bar close to Sinza. Jackson was not hard to find, his wide shoulders, swaggering stride, and three beers already gone. Ngoma waited until Jackson staggered out into the hot night, fumbling for a light and his cigarette. All it took was a gentle shove, a whispered threat to bring back old charges of assault, and Jackson began to talk.
“Hi, man,” Jackson said, casting nervous glances about, “we didn’t intend to kill him. Mr. Bura just told us to frighten him a bit. Scare him into backing off.” Ngoma remained silent, allowing the admission to linger. Jackson wiped the sweat from his face. “David was going to give it to the press. He told him he had photos, messages, evidence Miriam was with Bura. He told him he’d destroy him.”
“And so you murdered him,” Ngoma said, his voice level.
Jackson shook his head, “We drove him behind the Coral Lounge after closing. Just rough him up, you know? But. he fought back. More than we anticipated. One of the boys, Paulo, hit him too hard. David dropped and didn’t get up.”
Ngoma’s stomach churned, but his face remained impassive, “And you left his corpse at Kigamboni?”
Jackson nodded once more, “We panicked.”
Ngoma backed away, the cool night air invigorating his growing anger. Always the same, arrogance, some money, much stupidity. “And Leonard Bura?” he asked. “Did he instruct you to kill David?”
Jackson hesitated. “No. Not kill. Just… quiet him.”

Silence served a number of purposes. In this case, death was what it most likely implied. Ngoma appeared on the morning after at Bura’s mansion in Mikocheni with a warrant and a dozen men in his wake. Leonard Bura answered the door, barefoot and furious. Even fury-addled, he was a man accustomed to getting his own way.
“This is harassment,” Bura thundered.
Ngoma showed him the warrant, “It’s justice.”
They found David’s broken phone in the top drawer of Bura’s private office, SIM card ripped out, but recoverable. They found messages as well, cloud servers where backups had been kept without Bura even giving it a thought. Photos. Cheesy, lengthy SMSs. Proof of the affair. Proof of threats. Bura’s face when they showed him the evidence was well worth the months of dead-end cases and sleepless nights.
“You couldn’t show I ordered it,” Bura asserted, but even his voice was less strong now.
“We don’t have to,” Ngoma said softly. “You paid the men who did it. You hid a crime. That’s enough.”

As Bura was taken away in handcuffs, Dar es Salaam’s dawn sun rose slowly and inexorable over the city, another day, another secret pulled into the light. Miriam alone waited in the tiny interrogation room, the air heavy and stagnant. Ngoma awaited her beyond a pane of glass. Fists were crossed tightly in her lap so her knuckles paled. Cockiness that had come with tight arrogance back at the Coral Lounge had now been snatched away from her, replaced by reality. He walked without flourish and put a folder onto the space between them on the desk: letters, photos, bank statements. Its weight creaked the table.
“You should have told the truth,” Ngoma told her, speaking gently. “Perhaps you did not know they would kill him. But you assisted in covering it up. That makes you part of it.”
Miriam gazed up at him, and for an instant something broke in her face. Not only guilt, but fear, wide-eyed and wild. “I loved David,” she breathed.
Ngoma didn’t stir. Too many variations of love distorted themselves into betrayal.
“He discovered you and Bura,” Ngoma spoke softly. “And you chose the softer route.”
Miriam closed her eyes, tears flowing now, true but far too late. “I did not wish for him to die,” she stated.
“You didn’t want him enough to keep him alive,” Ngoma stated.

The silence afterward was the kind that didn’t need to be shattered. When the officers arrived to take her away, Miriam didn’t struggle. She moved stiffly, as if she were a doll that no one had wound up. Ngoma accepted the folder into his hands and let out a sigh. Justice wasn’t tidy. In situations like this, it hardly even counted as a win. A week on, the newspapers had jumped to newer gossip. Leonard Bura’s face continued to feature on the front pages, but now it was squeezed between ads and rumour pages. Miriam’s name was hardly mentioned — a footnote to another person’s downfall.

Ngoma sat beside the low stone parapet overlooking the ocean at Coco Beach. The water rolled up, unstoppable and merciless. Dar es Salaam’s skyscrapers glittered in a late afternoon haze of heat, inviting and forever out of reach. Farida put her arms around two cups of coffee and snuggled in beside him.
“You did fine work, boss,” she said.
Ngoma shrugged, “Fine work doesn’t bring a man back.”
They sat in silence for a moment, watching barefoot children playing soccer in the sand, the biting and caustic laughter a welcome relief from heat.
At last Farida stirred, “Think she’ll get time?”
Ngoma nodded, “Time enough to see the seriousness of what she did. But it won’t make it right.”

He remembered David, the man who fought so desperately for his wife that he fought war for her and was betrayed at his most helpless moment. A small man brought down by behind-the-scenes politics in a city that devoured men like him. Ngoma tipped over his garbage-can cup and stood up.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s another case somewhere.”
Farida smiled.

Behind them, the sun fell over Dar es Salaam, painting long shadows on the beach, on the city, on all the stories that would never be told in the hot, troubled night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Michelle Ding on Unsplash